1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to improving the legibility of content in a user interface. More particularly, the present invention relates to systems, methods, and computer program products for improving the legibility of a user interface by selectively enlarging portions of the user interface or by enlarging selected content in the user interface.
2. Background and Relevant Art
When the Internet was initially created, it was only accessible from computers in a strict sense and relatively few people had the ability to access the Internet. The Internet, however, has changed drastically and today, the Internet is accessible from a myriad of other devices such as personal digital assistants, Internet appliances, and cellular telephones. The Internet is also accessible using a set top box connected with a television set instead of a computer monitor.
In spite of this growth, the Internet still presents some problems that need to be solved. One of the problems faced by users and web page or content designers is that the same content is ultimately displayed on many different display devices. Most web pages, for example, are intended for display on a computer monitor that has known resolutions (such as 640×480 or 600×800, for example). Many of the other display devices, unfortunately, have vastly different display capabilities. Because the resolutions and display capabilities of other devices are different from the resolution and display capabilities of a computer monitor, displaying the same web pages on other display devices is problematic and inconvenient.
For example, a particular web page, when displayed on a computer monitor, may only require the user to scroll in the vertical direction. Internet users are typically accustomed to scrolling in a vertical direction and are most likely not concerned or bothered by this requirement. The same web page, when displayed on a television that has less resolution than a computer monitor, will likely require the user to scroll in a horizontal direction in addition to the vertical direction.
This is often viewed as undesirable from the perspective of both the user and the content designer for several reasons. Requiring the user to scroll in both directions makes some web pages more difficult to read. The user may be required to repeatedly scroll back and forth horizontally in order to read lines of text. In contrast with a web page that only requires vertical scrolling, a user is able to read many lines of text before scrolling vertically. In addition, many users are not accustomed to scrolling in a horizontal direction and prefer to scroll in the vertical direction.
This problem has been partially solved by resizing or reformatting content such as a web page before it is displayed on a display device such as a television set. Resizing the content is often performed by a proxy server, but may also be performed by the set top box or by another device. Even though this may remove the problems associated with horizontal scrolling, resizing or reformatting content introduces another problem that is related to the legibility of the content or of the web page.
When the images, text, selectable text, and other content of a web page are resized such that they may be displayed, for example, on a television set without requiring the user to scroll horizontally, some of the content often becomes difficult to view or read because it is has been resized. In particular, content such as images that contain text as part of the image may be difficult to read because the text has been made smaller or has become irregularly shaped. This often occurs because text that is part of an image, for example, is not recognized as text during the resizing process. Textual characteristics are therefore not accounted for as the image is resized. While the image as a whole may be recognizable, the text portion of the image may have changed such that it is more difficult to view and/or read. Thus, the legibility of the content or of the web page or of the user interface suffers when the content is resized to accommodate a particular display device.